peacegirl JLM's law is not immutable said:
How much more evidence do you need? In 50 years of trying to promote his ideas both you and Lessans have arrived nowhere. He got nowhere with it before he died, and you've been promoting his book on the Web for at least a few years on multiple discussion boards and getting nowhere. The book was published by a vanity press I presume because no legitimate publisher would accept it. You've been at a site called ILovePhilosophy and got your butt kicked, and you had an exchange with a person at a forum operated by the philosophy department at a Colorado university very similar to what you've had with me. He asked you the hard questions and you, as you did with me, accused him of not reading the material and not understanding it. You could not grasp that he could read it and understand it and not agree with it. That's always where you go when challenged, "You didn't read it, You don't understand it," and you continue to repeat without ever making the case that Lessans' claims are undeniable. That's way off the point, quite apart from being a useless tactic. You and Lessans are making the claims, the burden of proof is on you, and you have not provided it. The book seems to have the status of Holy Writ for you, but wouldn't you think that if there were any substance to it that somebody besides yourself would have been convinced by it by now? A more rational conclusion would be that his ideas remain largely unknown because they deserve to be.
No, I will not back off. Why should I? Just because you don't like it? Telling your critics to back off simply reveals the bankruptcy of your position. Neither you nor Lessans have demonstrated that this is an invariable law that works, that experiment has never been done. Resentment doesn't enter into it, neither does fear of determinism, neither does the size of your claims. The issue is that you have not proven your case, you've simply asserted it, and offered only some very sloppy logic and word games of Lessans' in support of it. What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. I began to be suspicious of Lessans just while reading the Introduction, in which he grotesquely misrepresents the worst of the human side of science as being typical of it, and makes several claims I knew to be false. Two examples from many: Mendel was not prevented from publishing, in fact his seminal paper was read to a gathering of naturalists--twice actually, if my memory is correct--and published in a journal, but unfortunately he lived in hicksville and the journal was not widely disseminated. He was a long way from the centres of science at the time. The people who later duplicated his discoveries did the required literature search, found his original work, and gave him primary credit, as honest scientists always will. Neither is it true that Roentgen was laughed at for his discovery of x-rays, he in fact won the very first Nobel Prize in physics just a few years later, in 1901. Such elementary errors of fact and interpretation did not inspire confidence, but I read the first two chapters anyway, as you requested. I found nothing to allay my original suspicions, the man writes badly and thinks sloppily and makes a lot of elementary mistakes. "As far as I'm concerned" seems to mean you're not going to pay any attention to anything that challenges Lessans' thesis. That's not how to discuss a scientific issue.
s_lone said:
Dexter said:
Dexter said:
peacegirl; It wouldn't enhance my credibility; it would give Dexter more ammunition to be used against me. So I am going to stick with my decision to not disclose any personal information [I said:
